Rain: A Tribute to The Beatles / Mark Lewis, Manager

February 9, 1964, is often cited as the beginning of the “British Invasion” of America. The Beatles, who had already been touring Europe continuously for three years prior, landed on the eastern shores of the United States and reclaimed the colonies via The Ed Sullivan Show. No shots were fired. Over the next 36 months, The Beatles appeared on stages across the nation. My teenage aunts were beside themselves in August 1966 when the Fab Four came to St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, just one week before they gave their final live concert performance at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

A decade later and four hundred miles south of the bay, Mark Lewis and his group Rain recognized a void in the musical landscape left unfilled since The Beatles’ decision to become a studio band and their subsequent break-up. Rain (the B-side song of The Beatles’ 1966 single “Paperback Writer”) began as a bar band just trying to pay the bills and emerged as the first tribute band. Now, over the years, Rain has grown into an international phenomenon of stage and screen.

The ensemble’s original keyboardist, Mark Lewis, now manages the organization, having relinquished his stage persona to Louisvillian Mark Beyer and Nashville resident Chris Smallwood (who received his M.A. degree at the University of Louisville School of Music last year). PNC Broadway in Louisville is bringing RAIN – A Tribute to The Beatles to Louisville December 2 and 3 for three performances at The Kentucky Center for the Arts. Considering the crowds who fill River Front Park every summer for Abbey Road on the River, tickets are likely to sell out quickly. “What is it,” I asked Lewis during our conversation, “that makes The Beatles such an enduring part of our culture nearly 60 years after their days playing in The Cavern Club of Liverpool?”

ML: The Beatles left us with a great body of music. They changed the world and the way music is presented. Before The Beatles arrived, you had Frankie Avalon, Fabian and the Four Seasons. Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were on the cutting edge of American music and he wrote some great songs. But in 1964, along came four guys who sang, were all great musicians and played their own instruments – two of whom had incredible voices, wrote all their material and did their own arrangements. And then there’s the look: they were fashion trend setters with the hair and the suits; even their boots were unique. I can’t think of any British artists who were superstars in the United States at that time, and those accents just blew us away. But it was their music that made The Beatles unique and important – song, after song, after song. Even before The Beatles arrived, I collected 45 RPM records and listened to the radio, but it was rare that I coughed up the money for an LP.
SD: Why not?
ML: Usually an LP had the hit song on it along with a bunch of other songs that sounded just like the single…but not as good. Then The Beatles came along. I remember after seeing The Ed Sullivan Show I ran right out and bought Meet The Beatles. Looking at the pictures and reading the notes on the back, I was amazed that these guys wrote all the music themselves. They had different guys singing on different songs and they harmonized really well. That was huge. At the time, southern California radio was filled with beach music – Dick Dale and the Deltones played a simple little guitar solo to simple chords. Needless to say, there were some great artists in rock ’n’ roll and some great songwriters like Neil Sedaka. A lot of great music came out of the early ’60s, but nothing…nothing like The Beatles.
SD: It was definitely the beginning of a new wave.
ML: I feel so lucky to have been able to go into a record store and buy Rubber Soul the minute it came out. I ran home and put it on the turntable. There were songs like “Norwegian Wood,” “Girl,” “In My Life” – and I was hearing all these great songs for the first time. With The Beatles, I’d get the single. But I also had to have the album because I knew every song on the album was going to be great.
SD: That must have made it difficult for you to decide what to include in your tribute.
ML: There’s so much great music that you could just about throw darts and create a great song list, because you can’t pick a bad song; and if you choose a weird one – sometimes we do a few seconds of “Revolution No. 9” – even that gets a response. It’s all so historic and such a part of our lives. For me, The Beatles are equivalent to Shakespeare. Sure, there are a lot of great playwrights, but, “Hey! It’s Shakespeare, pal.” Why do we still play Mozart? Because every once in a while someone comes along who is just that special. When The Beatles stopped touring, there was a void in the music world.
SD: When did the band Rain get together?
ML: I started in the mid-’70s. It was just kind of a fluke that I joined a band that did original material and we were all Beatles fans. We started to specialize in doing Beatles songs and approached some night clubs in Los Angeles and around southern California about booking us on off-nights (Monday-Wednesday) to let us come in and work for the door. There was no such thing as a “tribute band” at that point, but we had the idea that we would do a “Beatles night.” We didn’t know if anybody would show up since it was the middle of the Disco era and The Beatles had barely broken up.
SD: Was the positive response immediate?
ML: We had some people who would ask us to play music they could dance to or question why we played only Beatles. But if the evening was promoted correctly, we got Beatles fans and the audiences went nuts. The first time we ever played as Rain – A Tribute to The Beatles was at a bar in the San Fernando Valley. It was promoted in-house, we weren’t guaranteed any money and we invited all of our friends and relatives so we would at least have somebody to play to. It turned out well and we made some decent money for a bar band and the club owner wanted us back. Another club owner heard about it and then an agent came by and saw the show. Next thing you know, we started to get some bookings at high schools and colleges. It just became a fun way to make a living on the side while we waited for our own record deal.
SD: Did any of you think it would become a Broadway show?
ML: I don’t think any of us were thinking of this as a career in the early days. We just wanted to play great music and pay our bills.
SD: When you started your tribute band, were you trying to mimic The Beatles?
ML: That came later. We had no costumes when we started, but The Beatles always had a look so we decided to try that. We didn’t have any money, so we went to J. C. Penny and bought black turtlenecks like the ones on Parlophone’s With The Beatles (1963). After that, we had somebody’s grandma put together some Sgt. Pepper’s costumes for us and took a promo shot. Then we started to become a little bit more of a show.
SD: I want to be sure people understand that what you’re doing goes beyond a homage. You are recreating the experience of watching The Beatles on stage.
ML: Right. If you’re a jazz musician, you might want to play some Coltrane or popular Miles Davis tunes with your own vibe. We are really copying The Beatles note-for-note. That’s what made us popular: we really do sound like The Beatles, whether it be side two of Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or the stuff they did on The Ed Sullivan Show. In the beginning, we did the whole catalogue A to Z – not every song, every night, but we covered the spectrum.
SD: As you say, there’s a lot of music. Does the show change from performance to performance?
ML: Not anymore. Now we’re a Broadway show and there are cues and spots and multi-media and props that come in and out. We are fully produced and the crew has to know when things are going to happen. You can’t just change it around every night, or it would be a train wreck. When we do change the show around, we go back and re-vamp the production. We don’t just throw it together like we did when we played in the bars.
SD: Do you cover all the periods in The Beatles’' career?
ML: Yes. We have a little bit of everything. We play the songs we like and those we know will go over great with audiences. Some of them are their biggest hits and others are our favorite album cuts. We have video to take you through the era before their arrival in America up to The Ed Sullivan Show. And when the curtain goes up, we’re in concert. This is basically a concert, but we take you into the ’60s to remind or show you what it was really like.
SD: So it’s not all nostalgia.
ML: When you look back at the ’60s, it was a great time to grow up, but it also was a very turbulent time. If you actually lived in it and experienced the draft and the Vietnam War, all the demonstrations that were going on, the political and social unrest, it didn’t seem to be so much fun while we were in it. But we had great music and it was a great time artistically with love-ins and Woodstock. At the heart of it all was The Beatles. Every time they put out an album, there would be a whole slew of other groups following in their footsteps.
SD: What separates the music of that era from those before and after?
ML: It was revolutionary. People began to write music that said something in the lyrics. They sang their own songs, played their own instruments and produced their own music. Before that, the music industry manufactured pop idols. If somebody had a hit, the execs would make more songs that sounded like that hit. All of a sudden The Beatles came out and swung from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “This Boy” and “It Won’t Be Long” to “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life” and “Run For Your Life” and “Girl.” Then came Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky” …and you can go on and on. The Beatles just did stuff like connecting all the songs at the end of Abbey Road and adding “Her Majesty” just when you thought the album was over. Every song meant something, and that’s what makes it great to be able to bring this to audiences live.
SD: A lot of those songs were never performed live on stage by The Beatles.
ML: No. They decided not to do that when they were still in their twenties. They left a void and we recognized it.
SD: One of the reasons they gave for not touring was the complexity of their music. How do you recreate that on stage? Do you have an orchestra?
ML: No. That’s what I did and what Mark Beyer and Chris Smallwood, the present keyboard players, do. They took over my role and alternate doing the show. With modern technology, we can now duplicate sounds on synthesizer, sample stuff and nail the sound. When The Beatles were creating it, you couldn’t really do it with five people. Plus, their performances had become an excuse for people to just come in and go wild – be more than a musical experience. Once they decided not to tour, they were free to create things just for the studio. Paul McCartney would play bass, then he would go over and play some piano. John Lennon would play guitar and then put on an organ. They added effects and turned tapes over backwards; they would bring in orchestras and horn sections; and have french horn and piccolo trumpet solos.
SD: You were basically Rain’s answer to George Martin.
ML: I was for a long time, but now I’m more Brian Epstein. As the band grew, I realized I wanted to be either the full-time keyboard player or the full-time manager. I felt more comfortable finding musicians like Mark Beyer who love The Beatles and love to play the music with other guys who love to play it than I did finding someone to take over the management reigns. It’s important that everybody keeps their head in the game, and that’s the role I’ve played over the past couple years.
SD: Now there are five guys on stage, but you have more than that in the company who rotate. Do you have more than one group out at a time?
ML: Sometimes. When we did Broadway, we had two shows out almost all the time. We need to rotate around because we’re doing eight shows a week. When The Beatles wrote these songs, they were very young and only had to do them once in the studio. In this Broadway environment, you can hear every note and we want to keep everybody fresh for every performance.
SD: I’ve looked at some of the pictures on your web site and some of these guys really look like Paul, John, George and Ringo.
ML: Yeah, they’ve learned how to adopt those roles on stage. But if you walked into a room with them, you might not see it. On stage all the guys can resemble their characters – we’ve searched the whole planet to find these people and spent a lot of time training them – but we’re not like some of those Elvis guys.
SD: You all did the sound track for Birth of The Beatles. Did you meet any of the actual Beatles during that project?
ML: No. That was a Dick Clark production and, in fact, The Beatles and Apple Records tried to stop it. Their opposition actually helped to launch Rain.
SD: How?
ML: Dick Clark had done an Elvis movie that starred Kurt Russell back in the ’70s and it was a big hit on TV. He wanted to follow that success with The Beatles, but they didn’t want to lip sync to the original masters since they were supposed to be playing in The Cavern Club in Liverpool and in clubs around Hamburg. They were looking for people who could sound like The Beatles, and when Dick Clark himself came out to see us in the San Fernando Valley, he signed us. This was an ABC Movie of the Week in the United States and a theatrical release in other countries, so Apple Records forced Dick Clark Productions to put the disclaimer in every single print, radio and television ad around the world saying that the music was performed by the group Rain. The publicity we received opened a lot of doors. It was a huge boost for Rain – A Tribute to The Beatles.
SD: Do you send them a Christmas card?
ML: I should.
SD: Who comes to see the show?
ML: It’s very diverse. We get mostly Baby Boomers and the people who just missed the boom. We see a lot of people with their kids and grandkids who want to share this experience that was so transformative. They want them to get The Beatles and truly understand this phenomenon. A hundred years from now, there will be a group doing what we’re doing. The Beatles are part of music history and came along at a time when they could be captured for posterity in a way that wasn’t possible for Beethoven or Bach. Their music will last as long as there are people.

For more information about Rain – A Tribute to The Beatles, visit broadwayacrossamerica.com/louisville. Tickets are available at The Kentucky Center box office, by calling 502.584.7777 or by going online to www.KentuckyCenter.org.